President Obama to Democrats: Stay with me

President Barack Obama admitted Thursday to the American people that he “fumbled the ball” in implementing the heart of the Affordable Care Act, but his immediate concern is convincing congressional Democrats to give him another chance to prove he can cross the goal line.

The new play: Offer a fix to reverse the cancellation of millions of Americans’ existing health insurance, blame insurers for the situation, put Republicans on the defensive, and — if he’s lucky — unify Democrats around a new policy that might just give them political cover.

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Major players on ACA team

Democrats' credibility on the line

Obama blamed himself for the problems, a clear stab at saving the law by drawing attention to his own failings — and preventing a full-scale revolt from Democrats.

“I am the head of the team. We did fumble the ball on it,” he said. “What I’m going to do is make sure we get it fixed.”

The president said he understood why Democrats who backed the Affordable Care Act at tremendous political peril were so unhappy and asked them to stick with him. The administrative fix is designed in part to keep his fellow Democrats on board.

“I feel deeply responsible for making it harder for them rather than easier for them to continue to promote the core values that I think led them to support this thing in the first place,” Obama said Thursday at a White House press conference.

The risk is that none of this will work.

Obama might be so toxic on Obamacare that fellow Democrats reject his plan — or that enough of him do to make him look ineffectual. Since October 1, tracking the rollout of the health care law, Americans’ trust for Obama has dropped 10 percentage points, from 54 percent to an below-the-waterline 44 percent, according to surveys taken by Quinnipiac University.

Over the longer term, Democrats fear that they will get hammered at the polls in the 2014 mid-term elections because of the failure of the website at the heart of the federal insurance exchanges and public dissatisfaction with Obama’s handling of policy cancellations — including the fallout of his famed claim that if people like their health care plan, they could keep it.

That could cost Democrats seats in the House and, in the worst-case scenario for Obama, allow Republicans to win control of both chambers of Congress for the final two years of his presidency.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), the author of legislation to address the cancellation issue, said Thursday that the administrative fix Obama offered isn’t enough for her. While she said she was “encouraged” by Obama’s proposal, Landrieu, who is facing one of the toughest re-election fights in the country, noted that she would continue to push for her bill.

“I will be working today and throughout the weeks ahead to support legislation to keep the promise,” she said.

Behind closed doors, House and Senate Democrats have pounded administration officials over the twin Obamacare troubles and the refusal of the White House, until today, to own up to playing down their effects for several weeks even as the American people could see for themselves that the website wasn’t working and that plans were being canceled.